The Fallible Patriarch

Pope Benedict XVI
is in Turkey this week on a trip originally planned for the
purpose of meeting with Eastern Orthodox leader Bartholomew,
although the world is viewing it as the pope's opportunity
to make amends for a speech that caused great offense
throughout the Muslim world.

In that speech, given in
September as a lecture at the German University of
Regensburg, Benedict quoted the words of a 14th-century
Byzantine emperor in dialogue with a Persian Muslim. The
emperor told the Persian this: "Show me just what Mohammed
brought that was new, and there you will find things only
evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword
the faith he preached."

Benedict used the quote
uncritically in the context of berating Islam for a practice
of "violent conversion," which he said is a result of
Islam's spurning of reason. Specifically, Benedict said:
"But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.
His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even
that of rationality."

The rest of Benedict's lecture
sought to show that Christianity is so imbued with reason,
by virtue of its New Testament connection with Greek
thought, that science itself is deficient without resting on
the supreme rationality of Christian faith. It would seem
that his main point in the speech was to critique scientific
logical positivism and that the comment about Islamic
violence and irrationality was just a launching point for
that discussion.

With his poor choice of examples,
the Pontiff has engaged in the rhetorical equivalent of
playing with dynamite.

A gracious letter in response
from 38 Muslim scholars sought to educate the pope on
Islamic theology, pointing to the words of Mohammed that
"there is no compulsion in religion." The scholars pointed
to Islam's history of tolerance for other faiths, saying:
"Had Muslims desired to convert all others by force, there
would not be a single church or synagogue left anywhere in
the Islamic world." They also condemned in the strongest
terms the violent reactions of a few Muslims to the pope's
speech calling them "acts of wanton individual violence" and
"completely un-Islamic."

Theologian Karen Armstrong
said the pope's remarks were "extremely dangerous," and that
they "will convince more Muslims that the West is incurably
Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade." She said that
the myth of Islam as a violent faith is just that - a myth
left over from the Crusades. Extremism in the Muslim world
today, she said, is a response to "intractable political
problems - oil, Palestine, the occupation of Muslim lands
..."

Clearly, Pope Benedict, known as an
intellectual, failed to do his homework on Islamic theology.
Charged with promoting peace, he blundered and insulted
Muslims for no good reason. Benedict is revealed as only a
man, a fallible person with his own agenda that he pursues
imperfectly.

What is that agenda? And why, apart from
asking him not to antagonize the volatile Middle East,
should the non-Catholic public care what his agenda is?

Judging by his Regensburg address, we can see that a primary
concern of the pope is his notion of reason. He is concerned
that the triumph of science and secularism in the West has
unreasonably left faith behind. Elsewhere, he has called for
a return to "natural law," saying that while the Holy See
cannot become involved in "partisan political debates," the
Church will always work to uphold natural law. The Vatican
concept of natural law includes what most people call sexual
morality. We need to care about the pope's views because the
Vatican continues to impose this natural law on people
everywhere, not just Catholics.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI
proclaimed that every sex act must be "open to the
transmission of life," and the use of contraceptives was
against God's will. This was a huge disappointment to
Catholics worldwide, and the majority in the West began
ignoring the directive, while many left the church
altogether. The Vatican found this development profoundly
threatening, but instead of moderating its stance on
contraception, it only became more rigid.

Some
theologians believe that it is the doctrine of papal
infallibility, the idea that pronouncements by a pope are as
good as God's word, that makes it impossible for the Vatican
to backtrack on contraception. To protect papal authority,
the Vatican has to "stay the course" on birth control, no
matter what.

Dr. Stephen D. Mumford, president of the
Center for Research on Population and Security, has written
about the Vatican's campaign to influence US public policy
on abortion and birth control. He traces the beginning of
the Christian Right movement to the Pastoral Plan for
Pro-Life Activities issued by the American Catholic Bishops
in 1975. The bishops recruited like-minded Protestants, who
eventually became the visible leaders of what was first
known as the Moral Majority and then as the Christian
Coalition. This movement's impact on US politics is
undeniable. Its latest manifestation is Bush's appointment
of Dr. Eric Keroack as head of federal family planning
programs for poor women. Keroack calls birth control
"demeaning to women." Bush's father appointed a similar
ideologue to the position, who told the press, "When it
became possible for women to buy contraceptives on their
own, men lost their manhood."

"A misogynistic
prejudice has pervaded the Church's moral thought down
through the ages," wrote Francis X. Murphy, a priest who
reported on a 1981 bishop's synod on the Christian family
for the Atlantic Monthly. The synod heard pleas to modify
the Church's ban on birth control from leaders like Bishop
Iteka of Tanzania, who said that large families were a
burden that kept his people poor and unable to improve their
lives. Archbishop Dennis Hurley of South Africa made the
most challenging statement to the synod:

It is not easy
to explain to [couples] that the act of artificially
limiting the exercise of one faculty of life is
intrinsically evil, while the act of exterminating life
itself is not. For in certain circumstances a person may
kill, as in self-defense or in a so-called just war.

Murphy said that Archbishop Hurley's speech was expunged
from the official transcript of the meeting because: "He
touched exactly the weak point in the papal teaching on
birth control. Not only is the ban on contraceptives
biologically questionable, but the Church's tolerance of
killing a human being in a war or police action ultimately
calls into question the logic of its intolerance of
abortion."

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current
Pope Benedict, then ended the session, concluding that
consensus had been achieved on all the issues at hand,
"hardly in keeping with the facts," according to Murphy.

This was the Vatican's enforcer of religious doctrine in
action, a man who came to be known as "God's Rottweiler."
There is not much evidence of logic, fair play or compassion
in Pope Benedict's dealings with families, women and now,
with the Islamic religion itself.

The results of the
papal prohibitions on sexual conduct have been clear, if
difficult to quantify. Withholding contraception from the
world's vulnerable poor has produced unsustainable
population growth, hunger, infant mortality and maternal
deaths from illegal abortions. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 3
million people die from AIDS every year as the Catholic
Church does everything in its power to keep condoms that
might prevent the disease out of their reach.

In
Turkey, the pope still has not made an apology for his
quotation of the Byzantine emperor's remark or for
perpetuating the myth of Muslim irrationality and violence.
He called for an "authentic dialogue between Christians and
Muslims" but engaged in no dialogue at his meeting with Ali
Bardakoglu, Turkey's president of religious affairs. When
Bardakoglu told the pope that Western leaders were
distorting Islam's message as a religion of peace, Benedict
chose to simply not respond.

The man and the
institution are patriarchal to the core. The patriarchal
response is always to never back down, compromise or respond
to criticism. This is no way to work for peace.

Whatever opportunities the pope is now squandering in
Turkey, he will have an opportunity in the next several
months to save lives by changing the Vatican policy on
condoms and AIDS. To his credit, Benedict convened a working
group to study relaxing the ban on condoms for married
couples where one partner has AIDS. The group is
constructing a logical loophole in the "every conjugal act
must be open to life" dictum based on the fact that AIDS
will actually transmit death in a conjugal act. This will
allow African bishops to drop the line that it is better to
die of AIDS than to go to hell for using a condom.
Unfortunately the new policy, if Benedict adopts it, will
only apply to married partners.

I find Pope Benedict
to be a very curious man - an intellectual who worships
reason along with faith, who in his zeal to combine the two,
has left compassion behind.

*************

Kelpie Wilson is the Truthout
environment editor. A veteran forest protection activist and
mechanical engineer, she is the author of Primal
Tears, an eco-thriller novel published by North Atlantic
Books.

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